That’s stereoscopic 3D… cross your eyes until the images overlap, and you can see the scenes in 3D! Also, the image names are “vr1” and “vr2” – for “Virtual Reality”? As if I weren’t excited enough for this game as it is… Awesome!

There’s no 3d-effect here. It looks like the images are both from the same point of view, with the left image slightly distorted – but, the distortion also doesn’t quite fit what’s necessary for the oculus. Here are my top theories:
– They’ll be shipping the game with a bottle of rum included and distorting the images to make the experience even more surreal.
– They’re experimenting with a series of shower curtains and do demo renderings of how they will be distorting the imagery.

Wow as a big fan of Braid, if The Witness had support for virtual reality on PS4 it would be incredible, I think it’s the kind of game that would take a lot of advantage of the medium, and I’m sure Jonathan would find amazing ways to use the virtual reality for some incredible puzzles!

Yay, oculus rift support :D
Or perhaps whatever strange VR thing sony were rumoured to be working on?
I have to say, screenshots from oculus rift hurt my eyes, because I do the cross-eye trick on those side-by-side pictures, but if they’re setup for the parallel trick like that, I get an inverse depth derception. Most uncomfortable :C

While I understand that Jonathon & Co. are somewhat beholden to SONY,
“The Witness” can’t possibly be for SONY’s HMD only, as that POS stinks on ice.

Don’t believe me?
Go to YouTube and search: SONY VR CES 2013 & look at all the scathing reviews
from people [particularly The Verge & WIRED] just moments after they tested it out.
Summary: It’s like sitting in front of a big TV/Not at all immersive.
Go on & look, you’ll see ….

I’m with Ulf. Whether or not this is meant to imply virtual reality, these particular images have no 3d effect except a slight distortion on the left side. I grew up with Magic Eye books, and these don’t work.

I was sure this would mean Oculus Rift support but the doubt thrown in by others means I can’t tell if it’s for some other device or both.

It does put me in a quandry. I’ve entertained the possibility of buying a Rift once they go full commercial but I don’t know how serious that wondering really is. But if my most anticipated game for the past 3 years comes out on this and is the best way to play it, then I don’t know quite what I do. Will be even more conflicted if a VR version is not with the Rift which seems to have the momentum or it doesn’t release on that on Day 1.

Strange that, if it’s for 3D/VR/OR support, the images show no detectable parallax (see the branches in the foreground, for example, which should show the strongest between-eye differences and show none), and correspondingly, the images have no depth when viewed either crosseyed or walleyed. There is clearly distortion but not parallax. Both sample images show the same pattern: squeezed on the left, swollen on the right. I have no idea what this means. But it is a terrible demonstration of 3D, suggesting (because JB is not one to mess around) that it is an awesome demonstration of something else.

This image is cropped to eliminate the trademark rounded border that you see in oculus screenshots, but make no mistake, it is definitely distorted. Notice how straight lines in the first image are curved.

Also notice how the left and right eye images aren’t even the same width, and the images are not a standard screen resolution, or even, indeed, the same resolution between the two images. This points to the images being cropped and otherwise manipulated.

They do seem to be parallel 3D images (so going wall-eyed is the proper way to see it, rather than cross-eyed). I think there’s not a lot of obvious parallax because the images are cropped down / zoomed in from larger images. Everything we’re seeing is relatively far away.
This could have been done to cut down on the obvious fish-eye that straight Oculus screenshots have, to make it harder for us to figure out! It also means that looking at the images wall-eyed on a monitor is actually viable.

The actual distortions applied to these images are not the real ones. You can think of it as just being a test of an arbitrary distortion function. When you plug in a particular VR device, the distortion gets set up to be what that device wants (which is going to look pretty different from what’s in these images). Really these images are just saying, “hey look, we made the engine able to render two views simultaneously with different camera positions and distortions.”

(There may also have been a bug in these shots that put the cameras too close together, anyway!)

I wouldn’t say there is ‘no point’ in 3D in it’s current forms (Terry Cavanagh’s game “Naya’s Quest” could be used to make an argument for 3D. Or more obviously Mario 3D Land). But I think for most games you sacrifice too much for the small amount you do gain. When someone works out how to display the whole light-field, THAT will be interesting.

Interestingly enough, a working prototype of a refocusable display called a Near-Eye Light Field Display has been built by a researcher with NVidia. Unfortunately the main difficulty comes from that it condenses a high resolution display down into a much lower effective resolution in order to achieve the effect. So in order to have even 1080p refocusable, you’d need close to a whopping 15,000×8,000 source display image, which is well out of reach of anything resembling consumer hardware for the foreseeable future. But we can always dream. (Here’s hoping VR takes off pretty well.)

I can’t believe I hadn’t seen this yet! Thanks so much for posting. I am beyond excited lol. I didn’t know enough about optics to know if this was possible or not so it’s awesome to see that someone has actually done it (and that they work for nVidia!!).

Unless I’m missing something, this comes very close to completely solving 3D display. The only thing we need to do now is make displays with ridiculously high resolutions :P Although that will happen with time so I’m not worried :)

It looks like a pair of eyes, and from the top picture, it seems like an outset perception of the castle’s eyes (external looking in). Where as the bottom looks like the perception of the entity behind the eyes (internal looking out). Eyes are suppose to represent the window of the soul. . . and it seems (if Karl Jaspers isn’t rubbing off on me, lol) that the castle’s internal perception seems large and open, whereas the external perception of the viewer looking at the castle may seem very confined and limited due to external sensory perception? I don’t know, I was looking at it symbolically or with a speculative mind, it could simply be the difference between ports, lol I don’t know??? but that’s my inference at face value.